After reading and reviewing ‘The Power Of Dreams’, I shall be awaiting the latest Welsh saga From Rosie Harris, with interest. Released in paperback, in the UK, November 2010.

Synopsis:

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Fern Jenkins’ life is changed for ever when her brother is killed in action and her father dies in a mining explosion. Turned out of their home by the ruthless pit owner, Fern and her mother Wynne are forced to seek a new life in Cardiff. Whilst Wynne finds work in a factory, Fern attends the local school. But here she is bullied and is soon selling flowers outside Cardiff Central station to help make ends meet. When her mother is taken from her in an influenza epidemic, Fern has no one to protect her from her violent and possessive uncle. She longs to escape from the brutality and squalor around her and make something of herself. But with no money and her only friend away at sea, there seems little hope of her ever leaving her life of poverty behind, let alone finding the love she so yearns for…

Was born in Cardiff and grew up there, and later, in Dorset, in the West Country. She spent many years living in Merseyside and has now settled, with her family, in Buckinghamshire, where she writes full time.

She has had a large amount of work, both fiction and non-fiction, published and although she still occasionally writes short stories, her first love is 1920s and 1930s romantic fiction sagas, drawn from her knowledge of Wales and Merseyside, where most of them are set.

After reading and enjoying Leah Fleming’s ‘Mothers And Daughters’, I shall be eagerly awaiting the release of ‘Winter’s Children’, available in paperback November 2010

Synopsis

Grieving widow, Kay Partridge and her daughter Evie, unable to face the oncoming Christmas festivities, move into a cottage at majestic Wintergill Farm in the Yorkshire Dales. Kay wants to shut the door and forget about everything. Evie, struggling to come to terms with the concept of death, just wants her Daddy to come home for Christmas.

But Wintergill is far from the quiet refuge that they expected. Devastated by Foot and Mouth, Nik Snowden and his Mother Nora are facing a bleak future. The two are at loggerheads. Nora has had enough of the hard life but Nik wants to keep the house and lands that have been in his family for generations. Read more →

The Desmond Elliott Prize, is an annual event, now in it’s third year and is awarded for the best first novel, written in English and published in the UK, with books from all fiction genres being considered.

The prize was created in memory of Desmond Elliott, literary agent and publisher,who died in 2003.

He stipulated that his estate should be invested in a charitable trust that would fund a literary award “to enrich the careers of new writers”, so the prize therefore also comes with a cash award of £10,000, to support the new writer and to celebrate their fiction work.

Strange things are happening on the remote and snowbound archipelago of St Hauda’s Land. Unusual winged creatures flit around icy bogland; albino animals hide themselves in the snow-glazed woods; jellyfish glow in the ocean’s depths… and Ida Maclaird is slowly turning into glass.

A mysterious and frightening metamorphosis has befallen Ida – she is slowly turning into glass, from the feet up. She returns to St Hauda’s Land, where she believes the glass first took hold, in the vain hope of finding the one man who might just be able to cure her… Read more →

First Lines

Heddy Partridge was never my friend because I was pretty, popular, clever and blonde and my friends were pretty, popular, clever and generally blonde, too. Heddy Partridge was none of these things. Heddy was dark and lumpen, with heavy eyebrows and an unfortunately large mole on her left cheek, right below her eye. Heddy wasn’t […]

Random Quote

For me, the first and foremost challenge is plotting. How can I take all these really cool facts and other things I learn in research and fit them all together and add danger and intrigue and make it all keep building to a heart-stopping conclusion? After that is the sometimes plodding drudgery of getting it out of my head and onto paper (or screen). Now, I’m finding the push of marketing to be a challenge. So to sum this up: Plotting, Plodding, and Pushing.